Thank you Gregg, nice blog share. This is a big issue lately - it seems to swing to the left as a plethora of protection industries. That's all about oversensitizing children until they are more suspicious than curious, and that they have the right to hear only their side of the issue - but how can they thrive if they do not take educational risks? How can they learn to honor others if they refuse to hear other points of view? (And which make you wonder if this is just another form of bullying/predation in the guise of insulation from verbal harm).

But it also swings to the right by suggesting exposure to self-harm (or allo-castigation) builds character. This worldview is one we barely survived in the 30s and 40s and it did not work out so well. I have spent time with folks overwhelmed by bullying and trauma. Even battered rocks at the seashore do not grow back. Exposure does not go away. One does not get over lost trust; it takes a concerted effort to rebuild it by those who robbed it from you, not those who never disillusioned you. Arguing for exposure to verbal harm (or the right to cause it) is a 40's justification that the strong should inherit the Earth.

My generation grew up having to survive bullies in the approaches to the schoolyard. No one cared. Adults thought it "built character" (rather than creating a generation of disillusioned children, compelled to attend but denied protection). The evidential support of the arms and education industries over the survival of American school children tells me this situation has not budged. We honor education; that's wonderful. But we do not honor children anywhere near as much. Their education (fitness for industry) comes before them.

I love that you mention the great need for unstructured, unsupervised play. This too is how I see education proper; it should be a delight to investigate and share knowledge our forebears have been afraid to investigate. Yet too, sedulous play needn't be preparation for an aggressive, insensitive human imago stage. As Panksepp suggested, social play requires tender boundaries too - or no one will play with you again. I see this as extremely true for learners giddy to learn, only to be afraid to learn because it hurts and no one seems to care (e.g.. being forced to dissect animals as a child and being scoffed at if you refuse to do harm on command).

Enduring harm should not be a virtuous trait we nurture in our growing children so they can compare verbal and psychological scars in nursing homes as they wait for their impoverished and impatient offspring to divvy up their lifelong treasures. Children and young adults should be *excited* to attend seminars. Instead, they are worried they will be subjected to the verbal right to permanently damage their hungry ears, just so folks can compete for popularity as traveling lecturers. 

But this isn't what i really wanted to say.

If I may? I'd like to just "cast this into the assembly" ("-ject" means "cast" - it seems to capture this need for us to ask others when we need others to help us think further than we can). It's about what concept creep really seems to be. Would you ToKers with so many unusual and amazing ideas, do me the kindness of being open to an unusual idea?

Maybe our thoughts and our words are not products of our superior makeup? Maybe thoughts are intrusive because they are always intrusive. Maybe we are not our thoughts? (Maybe we are something better, but these thoughts steal all our attention).

My ongoing thesis asks the following questions. What if mental activity is a separate species, not some product of our integral evolution? What if we simply host mental phenomena, like any less commensal form of symbiotic survival? What if we do no produce thoughts, but are more like animals being farmed by their dominant mental phenomena?

Then these weird things we try so hard to justify begin to make sense. Then "we" are not defending our right to hurt each other with hurtful words, because our *ideas* are defending their right to do what they please (as they struggle to exist inside and among us).

Then this is not some exceptional psychological concept called "concept creep" (*our* failure to regulate *our* thoughts and words and acts). Now it is a very standard scientific concept... a species-wide over reliance on internal phenomena which makes us lose control of what we spawned inside.

Then these are not *our* thoughts... because we are their tools,they are not our tools. Guns are just like that. We defend the right to own them, and wonder why we can't control their use. But where else in nature do species make things they cannot control? We defend the right to think or say whatever we like (all well and good), but then we become frustrated we cannot control what we have thought or said (not so good). And living children are begging us to think again before we say things we cannot un-say.

Like any cunning invention, thoughts wield us just as much as we think we wield them. Here's an example: if I walk into a room and see a potential weapon but have no idea what it is, is it a weapon yet? No. I have to know it's a weapon. I will not reach in anger for a thing that cannot facilitate my expression of anger.

Another example: If I walk into a room and there is a sign whose words are meant to hurt me lastingly (even if i never come back to that room) can they hurt me if I am illiterate? No. Words only hurt us if we can read. It is a trade off. It is not a win-win to learn to read. You may learn like Fredrick Douglass that those you look up to look down on you, and wish you had never learned to read. Because now what you held so dear hurts you instead.  

A simple tenet: What I know will benefit me (when I am in charge of it) only as much as I allow it to injure me (when I am not in charge of it).

Whenever we invent a new technology, we are first unduly afraid. Then later we look back at how "silly" we behaved in light of what that invention has harvested (TV, social media). Each concept we create ends up biting us in the rear.

Why is that? Why don't we see our planet is dying? Why don't we see how more and more children are collapsing inside, from mental issues all centered around their failure to thrive - in a futile struggle for a biological species to leave its biology behind and become pure intellect? Instead we cheer in our assemblies at the extinction of nature and childhood, and how superior we are to our dying planet, and how oversensitive our children are to the impending death of their world.

Thank you for this topic Gregg - you never disappoint :)
--Lonny

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